Tobias Blanke

Biography

"Tobias is a Reader in Social and Cultural Informatics in the Department of Digital Humanities and director of the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH). He leads and manages large international interdisciplinary research initiatives and teaches at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Currently, he works on the development of novel teaching approaches in digital methods and big data to understand culture and society.  Tobias is engaged in a broad portfolio of research spanning big data and its implications for culture and society, the study and science of data, information and knowledge practices and new environments to study cultural and society. He has been heavily involved with research collaborations with other disciplines within King’s and internationally. Tobias has a mixed academic background both in philosophy and computer science, with a PhD from the Free University of Berlin on the concept of evil and a PhD from the University of Glasgow in Computing Science on the theoretical evaluation of XML retrieval using Situation Theory. He has authored numerous papers as well as books in a range of fields on the intersection of cultural and social research and computer science. His work has won several prizes at major international conferences including best paper awards. In 2012, he was a Visiting Professor at the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities. Prior to joining King’s in 2007, Tobias worked at Credit Suisse in the city of London as a lead analyst and developer in a data warehouse, at Free University Berlin and several smaller media companies in Berlin. Since joining academia, Tobias has taken leadership roles in multi-disciplinary research projects in excess of £4M worth of funding for King’s College London, coming from the European Commission, EPSRC, JISC, the Germany Ministry of Research and Education and the AHRC."  

Research Interest

"Tobias has played a leading role on several multi-disciplinary research projects. His interests are social and cultural informatics, dedicated to the critical understanding of the digital transformation of culture and society and the key role of information in it. Social and cultural informatics theorise this role and develops the digital methods and devices that support this study. Tobias works with a research team trying to teach computers to understand expressions of culture and society; a long-term goal which we are still far away from. Recently completed research includes work on open digital methods, social and cultural analytics, virtual research environments, graph databases, semantically enriched and intelligent digital content and the limitations of text analytics for historical corpora. Tobias has just published a new book The Digital Asset Ecosystem offering a new perspective on the collaboration between humans and computers in global digital workflows and socio-technical assemblages of humans and computers (crowds and clouds). Sage’s Big Data and Society have done a Bookcast about the book. Tobias welcomes the opportunity to supervise PhD students who want to pursue projects that relate to his broad interests."